Stop changing offline experience

Feedback and Suggestions
81

It doesn’t matter, space is limited is the point.

Yes, I have 20 sales tabs, but:
a) the manual selling does enforce you to be active, which makes low value not viable as you won’t play but only stay in your Hideout, which is another limiting factor.
b) the space itself is limited. If I would actually list everything valuable I have I would likely need 40-50 tabs, starting at 40c items. That means any items below 40c - which are many - would still be absolutely free for others to list.

So it still happens because of listing space, just not as the only reason.

Which also isn’t true, the way people handle it is to react to low value messages while they’re not in content, so if you message them repeatedly when they return to the Hideout they’ll sell it to you as it’s less time investment. Or you gotta wait a few minutes.

But still a bad system, has nothing to do with the argument I’m making though.

PoE does nerf mit-league actually. Several instances of that happened.
Outrageous outliers get reigned in. Bug-related outliers get reigned in.

We got a myriad of builds which have been changed during a league, usually 2 weeks in when the large-scale changes come those tend to break.

Mechanical oversights don’t get reigned in and are kept.

LE’s issue is that they don’t even react to bugged builds properly, and that is bad.

We got to differentiate there.

In an ARPG like LE?
Gear check primarily.
Skill check secondarily.
Build check is to be avoided as much as possible.

So putting effort into making him, positioning him and providing him to the playerbase is not adhering to their target audience.

Exactly what I’m saying. Could’ve used the effort invested to provide a smoother gameplay experience for the campaign, for the monoliths, fixed a skill up visually, adjusted content which falls short. Maybe re-working the dungeons a bit instead to start bringing them into any sort of acceptable state.

Instead we got a 99,9% unusable bit of content when a myriad of other issues exists.

I’ll reiterrate: As long as core content is not handled you don’t implement pinnacle content. End-game yes… long-term goals… pinnacle content? Nope, nonsensical, wrong priority.

Yes.
That’s the full answer actually.

If you’re able to outgear it then great! If you’re skilled enough to do it without outgearing? Also great!

Uberroth is neither though :joy:
You cannot outgear Uberroth with the majority of builds, so it’s not applying.
You also cannot skill-based kill him very undergeared because of several mechanics he has which will hit you if even as a fantastic player, so it’s a pure gear-check in place.

That’s overall bad design. High skill should allow to avoid everything, hard to do… but possible. Through the implementation of the nigh randomly appearing ground effects and degens in the arena over the course of the fight this is not upheld. The barrier for entry for gear is very high which makes it far less of a skill-based fight then would be ‘healthy’.
In comparison we can take uber-elder, shaper, maven in PoE. Those bosses provide persisting degens on the map which gradually fills up. Similar to how Julra degens happen. Be too slow and it fills the whole arena.
The difference is that you can avoid the majority in the uber-elder fight, stack the degens in the maven fight in a single place without taking damage and the same goes for shaper. Between the phases maven and shaper remove them as well… which is not the case for a good chunk of degens over time in the Uberroth fight. This enforces a minimum amount of DPS while the random field effects enforces a minimum amount of tankiness. Both barriers are ridiculously high for an attempt which then is in the way of actual skill-based play.
There’s a reason why we don’t see anyone killing Uberroth or Aberroth at level 50 or so… but in poE we do see that happening with a few madlads.

First of all… we don’t need to put Blizzard in here because Blizzard is simply incompetent, they have no clue about their target audience either, never had. Worked actively against the premise building up ever more and more in the ARPG sector… which is that people are damn tired (and not the sleepy one) about repeatedly restarting without any reliable permanence. With constant re-grinds of massive amounts of mandatory content to get to a reasonable power level. Shrines, Phanteon points, veiled crafts… it’s exhausting having to go out of your way to work gather together those things. Either miniscule upgrades through sheer tedium or ‘I should have it available since I’ll need it so I gotta farm for it and hope it happens while not giving me a direct reward yet, just the option’ style of progress.
It’s the same tedium as the re-grinding of blessings, which are RNG, which you need to re-do every Cycle and often need at a decent level as well which enforces repetition solely to hope for the outcome… not the gear-reward even. It enforces you to interact with stuff that doesn’t directly further your character itself, your gear… the focus of the gameplay.

Also EHG didn’t act with the existence of a massive bug but instead provided a poll and that is the issue.
The proper reaction should’ve been ‘Oh, there’s a major bug? Squash it!’ without a single question asked. Instead they wasted time, dimpled around and then had massive amounts of players lock in into that playstyle.
If the action to be taken is known beforehand then the loss of that power is reasonable to expect.
But it wasn’t, and that’s the mistake.

GGG says ‘We got a bug? We squash it. Expect that you’ll loose your power, you choose to use it, we won’t punish you for doing that but we’ll take it away, enjoy while it lasts.’ And if it’s a clear exploit they ban game-access for the league timeframe completely.

82

Very rarely and usually only because they screwed things up and allowed some interaction to either break the game or make you immortal. And when they do, they usually do it in the first week, not mid-league. If something is still too strong in week 2, it will likely stay that way until the next league.

Other than that, you’ve had several leagues where a build is clearly dominant but they didn’t nerf it.

As for bug-related outliers, so does EHG. That’s why the profane veil and the explosive traps builds died during 1.0.

So PoE only fixes bugged builds? Like LE?
Although this is also not true. Many mechanical oversights also get fixed after league start when they’re broken. For example, their recent change where the merc immune bubble is no longer affected by cooldown modifiers (because players were using that to become immortal). And that was more than 10 days after league launch, so plenty of people had already locked their build to it already.

I will agree with you that EHG does take too long to fix these issues, as we’ve seen with the aforementioned veil and ballista bugs and the imprint bugs this season. Although that is likely because they’re still inexperienced in this seasonal model and haven’t quite gotten their protocols ready to address these issues faster (although they already do for game/server breaking stuff, so they’re getting better).
They do need to focus a lot on this and improve faster, though, because it is an important issue.

But otherwise, the policy for build nerfing is the same for both: unless it’s a bug, leave it be until next league.
The main difference between both in this regard is that, after many years, GGG has gotten hold of their game balance, so outliers aren’t as outliers as they used to. But before that happened, there were several leagues where a build was extremely dominant and still wasn’t nerfed mid-league. Especially in the first 5 years or so when balance was all over the place.

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83

Yeah, but “space is limited” because the items are stored on a server somewhere but that’s not really used as a limiting factor…

Exactly, time & value is more a limiting factor than space.

So why is that good for GGG to do but bad for EHG? Unless you’re referring to EHG wanting to get player feedback on their appetite for nerfs mid-league is bad?

I think that’s fair, though “build check” requires balance to be a good order of magnitude better than it is at the moment.

But surely a boss positioned as “not do-able by the vast majority of players” (ie, a pinnacle boss) then surely that’s never going to be the target audience?

Yeah, I can get that.

84

The first limiting factor is that the vast majority won’t be players playing since 10+ years like me which are also of the mindset and the financial ability to put in tens of stash tab of value into the game while completely abstaining from MTX payments. Not even 1% of the players have what I have, and still I need to take substantial care of what I list as I would otherwise run out of space swiftly.

So yes, it is a factor, if you wanna nitpick at it or not, it is, and it is also a very well working factor.

Could obviously be better by not tieing it to any payment and making it a fixed thing (as it should be) but still functional.
Reduced functionality compared to optimal functionality is still functionality.
Which is superior to LE’s system in that manner as it lacks this functionality entirely.

I’ll absolutely say ‘yes’ to the last part here.
Why?
Because it takes time. EHG could’ve acted the moment they even started to decide if they even should put up a poll about it. Then they had to make the poll, put the poll out, wait for the duration of the poll and put the results of the poll in action.

Cut all of that and directly take action and it’s obviously superior, make a follow-up poll if you’re unsure, but decisive action is a mandatory aspect for a company of that scale. It’s better to do stuff and either fully miss - at which you roll back - or hit it right rather then wait until everyone is pissed off.

In PoE? It absolutely is the target audience catered to. PoE for example is a game specifically designed to need a substantial amount of time and knowledge, which is not something a new player can get easily… exceptions apply. Sure, they can with the right avenues, but first they would need to find those avenues, which is not always easy.

In comparison Diablo does the opposite. Diablo 3 did establish ‘you’ll reach your goal in a short timeframe unless you substantially screw up personally’. The general bar is low, nothing major available to challenge a player and which has to be overcome in a substantial way.

Torchlight Infinite is in the middle, not a single boss or content is ‘very hard’. They are all doable in a middling timeframe. You can enjoy the game and min-max heavily by repetition, but the core content is not hard to handle at all, there is no substantial ‘pinnacle content’ but instead simply substantial amounts of content by now. Variety is their premise.

Last Epoch… it’s not for variety gamers as the gameplay is extremely straight-forward, you got a single mechanic that’s optional, which is dungeons… for variety. Everything else is build into the maps and no choice there, you always get weaver content if you want or not. The only thing you can do is adjust the amount a little but and especially the scale of reward something provides… but all is always there. Min-maxers have no clear-cut road towards success. Casuals get turned off by ridiculous top-end content.
Who is it made for? There’s not any ‘substantial group’ which is represented by the game, which is why barely anyone plays it as the ‘core game’ but many go here as a backup one when they get burnt out from other games of the genre, a fallback… a spare tire. That’s what the game represents currently.
Imagine you being the fallback person only when someone else calls off from any interaction. Is that a good position to be in? Neither in a social circle as a person nor as a product is it a proper place.

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85

To be fair, all that LE needs in this regard is a good price checker. The limitation in LE is simply wasting time going to the bazaar and placing everything for sale.
If you already have 10 million gold and you pick up an idol that’s worth 1k, you won’t bother selling it.

However, without a price checker, you simply bulk sell everything just in case.

So once we get a good price checker, this issue will mostly go away. With the added advantage over PoE that in PoE many people place items for sale for pennies and don’t bother replying, which doesn’t happen in LE.

The biggest limitation in PoE isn’t actually selling space but simply the hassle of having to stop playing and wasting a portal every time you want to make a sale, so you often don’t bother replying to the low value offers anymore (though they should just remove them instead, but they don’t).

Not really, though. Even in PoE, only a small minority of players will even try Ubers. Even regular Maven, which is already way down the pinnacle scale, has less than 5% of players killing her.

Pinnacle content is always aimed at a small percentage of your players, whether the rest of your game is targeted to casuals or grinders, because you know most won’t bother with it. So even in PoE it’s only targeted for the top players, not the majority of them.
Even D3 had GR 150 (which was their version of pinnacle) which most players didn’t bother with.

I will give you that Uby targets less players, percentually, than Uber Maven does. PoE players are more likely to chase pinnacle stuff, but even then it’s still a minority.

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86

First of all… you wouldn’t waste your time anyway, price-checker or not. So you either remember the price or waste your time, even with it you wouldn’t list it because it’s simply not worth the clicks, nothing below 50k is usually worth the clicks at all.

I’ve spoken so often about it and it’s like talking to goldfish when it comes to that topic, but I’ll do it once more in a short manner with some direct questions, they all have only a single clear-cut answer which is a guarantee:

If the price checker is implemented and people check prices, what do you think would happen to item prices? Supply/demand after all. Would items with a prince-of 50k rise or fall in price now as they’re decently prevalent?

If the price checker is included what would that change to the speed at which the market prices change in total? Would inflation the visible earlier or later?

What is the limiting factor to listing items in MG mechanically when you ignore the actual effort needed to list items (which means clicks and time)?

What is needed to allow people starting in month 2 of the Cycle to have a reasonable chance to get up to the sheer value accumulated by others related to MG currently?

This is flooding, a price-checker doesn’t fix that. Flooding still happens, but now you got even less viable items to get gold from as people price them properly. If you see items sitting for more then 2 days at a 20k price then it’s unlikely that the price-floor is higher. But if you have no alternative then that same item should you need it personally would still be bought at 200k, it’s all supply/demand.

Also a price checker reduces time investment needed in listing items, which makes the quantity of items listed higher… not lower.

Nonetheless the premise of target audience they built up. Which is speedrunners, Hardcore players and long-term players. Everyone else can play on a lower level but they’re not catered for directly, catering to them happens indirectly, always did.
Memory strands cater to the top-end players, they have basically no effect for lower end players. T17 cater to top-end players. The current uber-versions of bosses cater to top-end players, crafting caters to top-end players… basically all ‘worthwhile’ in the game solely caters to top-end players and below you get a ‘dime in a dozen’ gear easily as people try to overcome this position piece by piece.
This is not the case in LE. You have barely anything to ‘overcome’… it’s a extremely swift journey towards you ‘baseline strength’ of the build, which takes… 20 hours of play-time if you’re half-way efficient? And then it takes 100 hours to pass beyond that stage randomly through luck without any clear-cut road ahead. Alleviated through the imprint mechanic and the LP rerolling a bit but still not even remotely ‘great’ of a state.

And also missed out absolutely nothing from not achieving it.

We get tens of thousands of uber-maven kills every league, hundred thousands likely actually… we don’t even have 5000 uberroth kills as much as I know.
And that’s not even remotely comparable in numbers when taking in the difference in player-count.
And then we have to take into consideration despite the player-count disparity we still have a content mass disparity. 8 pinnacle bosses. Delve and heist taking away people from moving towards them in a major way as well. Specialized farming strats for rare specific drops like temple farming (double-corruptions and elevated uniques from there), Harbinger farming for fracturing orbs, Shipments and map runner sustain for the settlers together with ‘Svalinn’ farming, Abyss farming, delirium farming, beyond farming, ritual farming, expedition, betrayal and bestiary all being core large-scale mechanics which need at times hundreds of hours to achieve the specific outcomes only found in there which allow people to instead focus on that.

There is no equivalent in Last Epoch. And despite all the things not even making you try to get to the uber-bosses they each individually are magnitudes higher in kill-count then uberroth itself is even after taking into account the amount of players attempting them. We only got a single avenue in Last Epoch and still it’s in a ridiculously substantial manner lower.

That’s how screwed up the implementation is.

87

That is not likely, unless it’s the same persons doing it over and over again.
If only 2.6% (went to check the actual number) of players even kill regular Maven, Uber Maven is quite likely in the 0.2% figures or likely less.
So out of 250k per season, 500 will kill her.

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88

First of all, 250k is not the amount of players playing during a league, it’s the concurrent player count. The individuals playing are substantially higher.
The same goes for Last Epoch. If it shows a peak of 50k we can imagine 150k-200k individuals to actually play the game during the Cycle, maybe even more.

So it’s not 250k people but around a million. Which means 2000 individuals. Some kill uber-maven once… others farm that boss, commonly hundreds of times or even over 1000 times in a single league as the reward is very high for the time investment.
That also doesn’t take into consideration the amount of people killing uber-maven in Standard, which is a substantially higher percentile of the people playing there as they have long-standing powerful characters for it available and some only do that day in and out. Same as with other pinnacle bosses. People specialize there heavily.

The same goes for Last Epoch as well, a substantial count of Uberroth kills is likely coming from Legacy, with pre-established characters… and the low number is a bad sign.

89

Yes, Uberroth is important for less then 1% of player instead of maybe 5% or preferrable even 10%.
What about the other 90%? Aren’t we talking about that?

The journey of reaching the pinacle is important, isn’t it?

Most videos I saw before playing were about the beautiful area of the main story and the unique story mechanic of time travel^^’

Monos are straight-forward, yes. Just like Rifts in D3. But D3 had more alternatives, sure.
Weaver changed Monos a bit, yeah.
For me, the classes are more easy to understand, without a need to check the internet (ignoring Uber here). So I play LE Mono instead of POE.
Also the graphic is different compared to torchlight. I favor LE graphical aesthetic (D3-like).

Basically, advertisement sold it to me as D-like game. It was supposed to be a D2-like game with season focus right?
It doesn’t need to be the best, it just needs to be enjoyable for me :slight_smile:

Pinacle content:
Less then 10% of player usually CAN do pinacle bosses.
Less then 5% of player actually DO pinacle bosses usually.
Maybe 10% of their time is spend on pinacle bosses?
Isn’t that less then 0,5% of the actual gameplay of the whole game then? (Most likely lot less)
To reach and prepare for pinacle content, you play and grind. The feeling by doing that is what makes people stay and enjoy the game. isn’t it?
Focus on what is important, please^^’ (Like the theme of the thread, cough)

90

Yes, and that is perfectly fine and good!

The story needs a lot of work still, I mentioned already that the campaign is a mess… because as you say… 90% of the play-time is not at bosses - albeit those are important since they’re the culmination of experience gotten from the game until then - but the content.
I would from those 90%… around 20% are in campaign and 80% in monoliths… which makes the campaign a substantially important aspect, especially since it provides the entry-point for players.

Having it in such a messy state is not acceptable plainly spoken, never was, never will be. It need the finished reworks, it needs the finished acts and it need loot lizards and nemesis to be removed from it.
Why the removal? Because people already complained heavily about ‘the campaign is piss-easy!’ when that wasn’t even in there… and instead of sitting down and turning on their brain EHG went and actively shut it off by implementing extra things which vastly empower the rate at which equipment is acquired into the place which is already outpaced by a casual player playing it. That’s baffling plainly spoken.

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91

I do like Nemesis for finding uniques occasionally. Most uniques are balanced to shine at the level you aquire them. Which might be 20, or maybe 30.
To be able to play certain builds, I like farming Nemesis at low level and go with an unique I like.
This is absolue personal and I don’t like using any t7 affixes on them or upgradet Items in general. Also I don’t overpower my char. (in MS)
In short: I like to have this as an option to use occasionally. It makes my playthroughs more different and enjoyable

Though, fully agree 100% of you and would still be happy even if Nemesis is completly removed.
Additionaly, I would remove forging until you actually unlock it. It makes finding items, opening chests important and raises difficulty

92

Imagine this:
You got an item with a good t1 affix on it. Two scenarios here…

  • You raise it to t2. Add another t1, raise that to t2. You wait until you hit level limit for t3
    = No need to change until Level limit to t3
  • You find another item with 2 good t1 affixes and change. You find another Item with a good T2 affix and a random other affix. Seems worth, you change.
    = Progress, worth finding loot, learning in trying unusual affixes

The feeling is different! And there is more worth in the treasure chests and additional area the game provides. So you can search for better loot, instead of just crafting it at low level …

The learning experience of new player is over time, which is why something like forginf is introduced only later in game.
A new player might not even use forging even when a quest is added in starting area!

Imagine this:
The Devs change the difficulty of MS.
Now, old player have barely enough difficulty at start.
New player though, they might not use forging early on and have a disadvantage. The Difficulty might be too high, because it was balanced with people using forging in mind!

Isn’t this the case?

93

Yes, it’s fine for unique acquisition, which is absolutely acceptable.
But T7 items?
Legendary items?
Those cannot be acquired at that respective stage of the game. It’s more then odd to have items dropping which are basically limited to only start dropping at level 90 content when you’re in level 30-40… that is unfitting.
It’s also not good to have T7 legendaries randomly being acquired in the campaign, those are hidden behind the keys, getting a LP unique and getting a T7 exalted… which once more… level 90 content.

If they adjust it it’s fine too, just not ‘the current state’ of it, because that is a mess.

And the forging needs a new intro as well, yes. Introduction later in the game would be a decent start as you’ll have found a few shards by then and upgrading an item or 2 is fine by that time. As you say, there’s value in finding items and a different type of value in crafting items. Gradual smooth feeling of progression. ‘I have more options now, the game has opened up for me!’ is a great feeling.

Not really, it’s the culmination of everything together happening. Not knowing which stats are important (flat damage rather then percentile for example), how to skill your skills… especially with the nonsensically high respec issues early on (which fall away completely at end-game, should be the other way around). Makes people get ‘locked in’ early in their playtime and that feels bad. The start is there to experiment, the longer you play the less experimentation and the more you should get ‘locked in’. Your character is taking shape and the way you do that should’ve some meaning.

Currently it’s the longer you play the more malleable your char becomes, which is very very odd.

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94

It has introductions.
It has a pop up at the level 15 area ‘Armory’ (similar to that evade pop up).

Then after reaching the imperial era, at the exiled-camp (level 23 area) you get a quest for forging. And the NPCs tell you, you absolutely need some upgraded affixes to beat the king.

Before that, the game is supposed to be balanced without forging.
When player replay the game, early forging is part of the reason the start is easy for them. That’s why I suggested to simply disable forging until level 15 Armory (not a clever solution, lol :upside_down_face:)

Edit: Maybe the game initially did not have the ‘F’ forge-button. So player couldn’t forge until reaching level 15 area.
But with the button implemented, the early main story character got buffed.
An improvement of life involuntarily buffed early game.
Bet the game wasn’t designed that way…

95

I remember at around level 30, the shop rarely has rare items.
Most items I were ‘normal’ or ‘magic’, so I rarely used the shop. I also drop all the lower level items too. While getting less good gear, it makes sense to upgrade your gear, to make it better.

Really, I bet that ‘F’ Forge button was not supposed to exist at first and forging was not meant for early game…

96

before s2 dropped. i felt like i finally found a d-like that i could outright replace POE.

one major issue i had with poe is how hyper optimization feels as a requirement rather than a reward.

LE didnt feel too punishing as c300 felt kinda optional. uber abby is a sudden jump in difficulty and gates good gear.

the more i learned about it. the more i felt disgusted.

i ll also add, if all the modern d-likes are going down this path, i m actually fine with quitting the genre entirely. in fact i’ve been playing NRFTW and dungeon siege 2 a huge lot more nowadays. DS2 admittedly has a lot of shortcomings but i m enjoying the slower paced combat albeit more of a gearcheck rather than requiring real skill

97

That’s fair enough, but both of those games are arpgs.

98

lol are you seriously gonna pick on that. do i need to specify how d4, d3, poe1,poe2, tli, le are modern d-likes?

in any case nrftw is still in ea, its mostly skill based. ds2 i m playing because i ve never finished it back in the day. definitely would quit the game cold turkey once i had my fair share.

as for nrftw i’ve killed everything without a build guide. just making smart choices and perseverance. in fact i’ve killed many bosses using a “weak glass cannon” where my dps isnt too high to begin with but my defenses are shit. still can win.

something thats neigh impossible in LE.

come to think of it. most of poe2’s bosses can actually be overcome with patience and positioning. LE’s campaign boss majasa is a huge gear check. 1-2 slaps and you’re dead.

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